Alabama Hip Hop Week kickoff

By: Cherish Lombard, Posted by: Cherish Lombard

July 7th marks the beginning of the 7th Annual Hip Hop Week, a week dedicated to bringing local communities together in an effort to end violence. The week kicked off with a trash clean-up in the Orange Grove community. Studio 10 Host Cherish Lombard was part of the group that was there picking up trash.

Most of us know trash belongs in a trash can. But some people think if there’s not one around, it’s okay to just leave their trash on our streets. That’s one of the reasons the 7th Annual Alabama Hip Hop Week kicked off with a community clean-up. The volunteers cleaning up garbage in Orange Grove are hoping to send a message.

“If everybody comes together and helps clean up the community it’ll get better," says Brittany Fleming.

Allauna Davis and Jaquan Fleming also took some time out of their day to help pick up trash. Allauna says she did it “To keep Mobile beautiful,” and Jaquan said he did it “To support Alabama.”

They both picked up their share of candy wrappers and bottles, but look around and you’ll small pieces of trash aren't the only things littering our streets. Volunteer J-45 found quite a few larger pieces of trash.

“Tires, bed frames, a lot of trash that’s probably been out here for years," he says.

Kalenski Adams organized Alabama Hip Hop Week starting with Monday's clean-up not only to help beautify our neighborhoods, but also to bring all of us who live in these neighborhoods together.

He says, “We got a lot of violence going on in our community, in order for us to change the mindset what’s going to have to happen is we gotta bring the family out so when they leave our conference, when they leave our urban summits or our community days they can go home and talk about what we talked about.”

Adams says togetherness brings positive change, something he feels is needed now more than ever before.

All the trash that was cleaned off the streets today will be picked taken to the city dump.

You can support Alabama Hip Hop Week through Sunday. Here's a list of all the events: